He tells them that he is the Father, so that makes him a male. God places men at the head of the household, wives are supposed to be submissive to their husbands as far as decision making goes. This is present all throughout the Bible, men as the leaders.
Exactly what I was saying. And more evidence of the immoral and reactionary nature of orthodox Christianity, as far as I'm concerned!
God the father is referred to in the singular throughout the Old Testament, not plural. It is a monotheistic religion not a polytheistic one. The Us in the statment is the trinity (Father, son and holy ghost) and that man is made in the image of the trinity and not only God the father. In the very next verse it refers to God as him. Some believe the Us to be including the angels as God is conversing with them, others believe it is the trinity.
This is also what I was saying. And unless one wears blinders, it is patently false. The plural nouns for G-d were creatively reinterpreted by Christians, but that was not their original function, and it is not their function to-day for Jews. The trinity is mentioned nowhere in the Bible, and was not even commonly believed by early Christians; the idea did not become doctrinal until the fourth century, and was rejected by substantial numbers of Christians for centuries afterwards. (The so-called Arian Heresy was a much simpler and more elegant explanation. Had it not been rejected, vast numbers of Christian communities might not have eagerly converted to Islam--which has a much more logical, if flawed, conception of G-d.)
It isn't called the Bible without the New Testament, it is the Torah otherwise (that makes it Biblical lol).
I beg to differ: The expression 'Hebrew Bible' will be on the cover of dozens of copies at your local bookseller. The expression in Hebrew for the Bible is Tanakh, which is an acronym of sorts for the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. And Tanakh is always translated as 'Bible'. As for the term 'Torah', it has two meanings: either the Five Books of Moses or the entirety of Jewish Law, including Tanakh, Talmud, midrashim, and the oral tradition.
Of course it is symbolic, Jesus is the lamb that had his blood spread over the doorway (Passover). That was a human sacrifice by God, not by people. Jesus wasn't killing himself, he let the Romans crucify him and did nothing to resist (even healed the ear of the guy who had his ear cut off by Peter). God again doesn't have to live by Jewish law, he isn't a human. Many Jews understood the message and still do today, despite your claims.
Yes, but if his point in making such sacrifices was to--as you say--lead people to faith in him and love for his sacrifice, he chose a foolish way to go about it. The church of James in Jerusalem died out pretty quickly, since recruitment was hard and the end of the world was not forthcoming. In time, Christians forgot that they were following an apocalyptic prophet of doom (Paul) and re-interpreted scriptures in a way that allowed for the flourishing of Christianity in the Roman empire. Amongst Jews, however, conversion rates have always been minuscule, and predominantly amongst the uneducated.
We don't make the rules if you believe in a God.
Oh? Tell that to the Church Fathers, to Augustine and Aquinas, and to centuries of theologians who invented new concepts later considered doctrinal by Christians. Your own text here provides two examples, one ancient and one less so:
You can't even see God in his full glory to even know if he was male or female. People get blinded for life or die at the sight of God.
So, ummm... Who made that shit up, then? If you want to take the texts literally, what about Jacob or Moses? Now here's the second:
The afterlife is indeed a Christian invention and not something that is believed by a good portion of Jews. ... The problem is that an afterlife was by some taught by some rabbis during the years prior to Jesus being born. That made an afterlife something that is generally accepted at that time (Jesus was born during the Roman occupation).
Exactly. So if the afterlife is not mentioned in the faith Jesus grew up with, what makes one so certain that it was no made up along with the majority of Christian ideas? (Contrary to popular myth, Christianity has little in common with Judaism, and is more akin to eastern mystery cults such as that of Mithras, a Persian warrior god worshipped in the Roman legions.) Anyway, the point here is that some fellow either invented the belief out of whole cloth, or else 'discovered' it through creative re-interpretation of ancient manuscripts. And when it comes to the interpretation of documents, it generally holds that readings which take into account the culture of the original authors come closer to the meaning intended by those authors. Reading the Hebrew Bible through the culture of Greek and Roman paganism produced Christianity.
Obviously you don't as you are incapable of even typing the name and you have to put a hyphen in the middle... G-d lol.
The reason for this was kindly pointed out by Kiriana above. I hyphenate the English version of the ineffable name out of respect for Jewish tradition.
You can't deny responsiblity for bad or immoral actions as a Christian, sins are there and not justified. I don't believe in predestination, I believe we are given free will and choose between right and wrong. If we choose wrong, we will "reap what we sow". That is we will have consequences. Humanity has raped the earth more recently than it did during the Dark Ages, we do it with out technology and religion has nothing to do with it.
Oh, but it has everything to do with it! If the earth was given to man to do as he willed, as some argue, then that rape is religiously justified. If a more enlightened view is taken of those passages, one is left still with the apocalyptic eschatology of orthodox Christianity:
i.e., if one is expecting the world to end when G-d is finished with it, then our damage is ultimately of little consequence. Beliefs of this sort--that G-d will end the world, or that he wills events into the form they take (theodicy)--are either a conscious or unconscious influence on the environmental views of millions of Christians.
Anyway, the main point one should take from this is that sin and immorality should not be synonymous. Many actions which are not sinful, or are even desirable according to religious doctrine, are deeply immoral. It is fortunate that some of these attitudes have gradually been effaced, such that we no longer murder wives who commit adultery, and can no longer sell our children into slavery. What you should take from that, however, is that morality has advanced
in spite of religion, not because of it.
Even more important are the reasons that one chooses to be moral. If a man acts righteously because he fears damnation, he is not acting in a righteous manner; he is only feigning goodness. If, however, he analyses his options and chooses to act rightly
because it is right, he has made a moral choice. It is the ability to make such decisions which makes us human. If we must act a certain way only because the parental authority instructs, we are no better than apes...
The law wasn't MEANT to be impossible, just that supposedly only one person in history has kept all of God's laws perfectly during their lifetime (Jesus). That means people are incapable of keeping God's laws left to their own devices, they are bound to screw up somewhere as it is in their nature. It is extremely unlikely and almost impossible for someone to keep all of God's laws perfectly, there are too many and they are damn strict. In my statement I did not use the word impossible anyways lol... I said you can't follow them perfectly and I bet you can't no matter how hard you try (though I know you wouldn't try). That isn't impossible, that is extremely unlikely.
I do, actually, try to keep most of those still possible to be kept (many are dependent upon the Temple culture in a vanished land). But you miss the point here. It is only later Christian doctrine--
i.e., someone's
new idea--that only Jesus could keep the Law fully. And in perfect honesty, one much see that he did not. Have you ever read out all of the Laws, or are you basing this on Sunday School reasoning? There are 613 mitzvoth, and I'm sure you can find one that Jesus missed if you look...
To get back to the point, though, we should recognise that the Law was, 1) not meant to be impossible, and 2) that it
has been kept by hundreds of thousands of righteous Jews, who spent their entire lives immersed in those mitzvoth and intimately aware of the consequences of every action. The assertion you make would probably offend a lot of people who know that Law a whole lot better than the average Christian...
If you don't have faith and you don't believe then none of this matters. It is just like reading fables and myths. It isn't real to you, and nothing is going to change that. People without faith need a spiritual experience to make them see what they can't see themselves imo. It has nothing to do with rational thought and can go right against it. Faith is a delusion to those who don't have it.
And perhaps also to those who do. We could stimulate your brain and give you the sensation of a 'spiritual experience'. Would that make you worship science, then? Given the composition of our brains and the vagaries of our senses, no experience should be sufficient to induce belief in the improbable or otherwise impossible, unless the denial of that belief seems more incredible still. I'm with David Hume on this score:
The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."
If you don't respect God, then fine lol.
I can respect a good many versions or varieties of god, gods, or G-d.... but definitely not the Christian one.
... He created the universe and his creations are ridiculous, although he might laugh he is also probably bothered by how evil some humans are in how they live their lives. IMO God should just wipe us all off the earth and start over with some boring creations that are more capable of being perfect.
I think a greater and more noble challenge might be to understand and appreciate the sources of our flaws, and learn to live with them in a way that helps us to transcend our origins. Such an ideal might make for life a
meaning that is worth truly
living for.
As for G-d's creations, I wonder how the other worlds and their flawed inhabitants have fared... It seems awfully jealous of us humans to take the creator of the universe for ourselves, and ignores the hundreds of billions of visible galaxies. Much harder, I reckon, to believe that the rest of the universe was put there for us to look at once you've stared into the Hubble deep-field photos a few times...
